


The Knights of the Morning

by dreadwulf



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, non-canonical?, sorry I couldn't hear you over the sound of my own wish fulfillment, unlikely?, very angsty but it gets better, what's that you say?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-26 04:46:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14394588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreadwulf/pseuds/dreadwulf
Summary: A tale of Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth and the aftermath of the Battle for the Dawn.





	The Knights of the Morning

**Author's Note:**

> If you read The Knights of Winter, this is kind of that story in reverse. Trying something a little different this time. As with all my one-shots this is unbeta'ed.

At first it seemed that all had perished, when the morning came and we the living crept back onto the field to reclaim our dead.

It took some time to get us to the vanguard, where Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth had lead the Battle for the Dawn. In all the long acres of battle where countless corpses lay at peace there had been not one survivor. When the Night’s King had fallen they all had collapsed in place like puppets with cut strings, from the armies of living and dead alike.

When at last we reached the vanguard we had no hope left that any might still live, and the sight of the two knights did nothing to dissuade us. We found him lying on his back, eyes wide open, a terrible wound broken open his chest. She lay curled around him, covered in blood, both the red blood of the living and the blue-black wight’s blood. She lay so still with her eyes half-open and absent that it was only when we tried to move her that we realized she still lived.

She was not so much unconscious as she was _stopped_. She had simply lain down and stopped. Ser Brienne (though it was only after this that she was knighted, children, for in those days they did not knight women no matter how brave and capable, and she would be the very first) showed no sign of awareness that anyone had come or that the battle had ended or even that she still lived at all. Her eyes were dull and dead and did not see us, and when we spoke she did not hear us. But when we lay hands on her and tried to pull her away from Ser Jaime's body she stiffened and would not be moved.

Among us, a little way away, stood the Red Woman, Melissandre, who had come to watch the day break over the ashes of the Night’s King. She had watched the battle with us at a distance, not quite a woman – a witch, we said. She stood now apart from us, contemplating the scene distantly. In the light of morning her hair and her robes seemed to take fire, smouldering hazily in the sunrise.

Ser Podrick Payne, who had been Ser Brienne’s squire then, came to us weeping. He had not been in the battle due to an earlier injury and had come to the battlefield hearing that none had survived. When he saw she lived he wept harder, knowing how she would suffer.

Ser Payne knelt at her side and he put his hands on her, so gently, so gently, and he said: “Milady, please let us bring you home.”

She did not appear to hear him, not any more than she had heard us. A small crowd of us now surrounded her on the field, but for her there was no one there living, only acres of dead and her utterly alone.

Ser Payne tried again, for he was devoted to her. He encouraged and cajoled and finally pleaded with her: “Milady, we need you. We need your help.”

That was when she closed her eyes against us all and spoke, so quietly that only Ser Payne could hear her. She said only: “ _No more. Please, no more.”_

“I’m so sorry,” he said back. “I’m so sorry but we need you a little longer. There is still the war in the South, and the kingdoms are a shambles, and there is no one left to lead us.”

She took a long, shuddering breath, and turned her face away.

Her pain was enough to break all of our hearts, for Ser Brienne had been so brave and bold in all those dark days, enough to inspire all of her fellows to keep fighting for the dawn, and now the battle was won and she was lost. She had given all of her strength and had nothing left; she had given _him_ , and she had loved him with all her heart. She could bear no more.

We saw then her mighty blade Oathkeeper a few feet away. It too was stained with blood – red blood, man’s blood, alongside wight’s blood. The sword shone like the sun, so much that you could not look long upon it without shielding your eyes, and it burned hot as fire. When one of us tried to pick it up the hilt was hot to the touch, and we had to leave it where it fell.

We learned what had happened only later – how they had agreed, Ser Brienne and Ser Jaime, that if there were no other choice one would sacrifice the other if it would mean victory for the living. The Three-Eyed-Raven had told them it must be a Valyrian blade that kills the Night’s King, and one stained with the heart’s blood of a living man, a hero. They had promised each other to perform the sacrifice if it seemed there would be no other way. And yet, secretly, each meant to be the one who would die, for they loved each other so dearly that they could not bear the thought of killing the other. They had fought to the bitter end, as all their allies fell around them, and no blade ordinary or spell-forged would make even a mark on the skin of the leader of the Dead, and at last Ser Jaime knew there was no other hope. In the final moment he threw away his own blade and called on her to fulfill their vow and when she had driven her Valyrian sword through his heart it had broken her, so much that she did not remember pulling the sword from his chest and using it to destroy the Night’s King. She did not remember the sword blazing like a star in the night or the dawn breaking over the horizon as the wights collapsed and died at her feet. She did not even remember lying down at his side and putting her arms around him. She had done it all in a kind of trance, because she had promised him she would, and then because she could not stand to do anything else.

The Red Woman looked on the lovers entwined amongst the dead, and she looked at the shining sword, and she called it Lightbringer, the red sword of heroes.

She asked whose blade it was that had brought the dawn, and when we told her she was astonished, for the Red Woman had believed that Azor Ahai would be the Prince Who Was Promised, a royal of the great houses, and not a lowly warrior, a woman, who was not yet a knight.

And she shook her head with concern, for if Azor Ahai were to fall the darkness would win. Though the sun had risen it was not yet strong, and there were still places where the darkness lingered and the dead still walked. “Will she not rise?” she asked us.

We told her no, that the lady was undone. We would soon have to burn the dead, and she might burn with them, if she would not leave.

The Red Woman knelt beside them and put her hand on Ser Brienne’s shoulder. “Child,” she said. “Child, stand back. I will wake him for you.”

At this Ser Brienne finally turned her head and looked at the Red Woman. “You can do that?” she said in a very small voice.

“I may,” the Red Woman said. “If the Lord of Light wills it. And I believe he will.”

We helped her to rise and move a few steps away; she would go no further. Ser Brienne kept her eyes fixed to him and to the Red Woman and all her being was in that gaze, nothing else in the world existed to her.

Melisandre, priestess of the red god, prayed most fervently over the body of Ser Brienne’s lover, who once had been known as the Kingslayer. She called upon the Lord of Light to have mercy on his champion, so that she might bear the light across the seven kingdoms, by returning to her he whom she had loved most in all the world.

“Lord of Light, I did not know your champion – I saw her and I did not know. For my ignorance I offer this payment. Then the compact is done,” she concluded her prayer, “and I pass on your gifts.”

Then the Red Woman drew back her hood, and she was old, and then older still. Her red hair changed to grey and then to white. Her smooth skin wrinkled and puckered and she curled up smaller and smaller until her robes rustled and blew away in a cloud of dust, leaving only a jeweled amulet dull with rust.

In that same moment Ser Jaime Lannister sat up and felt at his chest with his hands – the wound he expected to find was not there, it had closed up as though it had never been there – and he saw all of us around him staring, and he said, somewhat apprehensively: “What have I done now?”

When he stirred and rose Ser Brienne put her hands to her mouth and cried out loud, a wail of pain and grief that had been too great to give voice to, and she broke out in tears, collapsing into Ser Payne’s arms.

Later, Ser Brienne would only say that she had driven the sword into her lovers chest and then he had been healed, and in between that time she had not lived, she had died with him and come back.

The newly resurrected man looked about him in confusion and saw the sun rising for the first time in months, and in it (when he looked directly at it, as you must never do unless you are the newborn champion of the dawn) he saw a vision. He saw the winter rose withered and replaced with grass and green. He saw spring and summer and winter coming faster and faster, seasons as we know them now lasting months and not years, and that dark magic would still linger in the winters, that there would be monsters and shadows and two riders on a long road vanquishing them. And he was filled with joy, for it was his own heart’s desire to be a knight and to fight alongside his lady.

Then Ser Jaime saw his lady weeping and rushed to her side to console her, and she wept all the harder when he drew near. He looked very distraught himself for he had never seen her cry before, never once in all the years of war and darkness.

She begged his forgiveness most profusely for she had stabbed him through the chest and it had broken her own heart. “My lord, I killed you,” she wept.

“My lady,” he assured her, “I live.”

He gathered her in his arms and held her tight, and he did not let her go, not then nor ever afterwards.

The two of them were both knighted after that, him a second time and her the first, the first for her and the first for any woman. And they swore no oath to any king or country in the new Five Realms but only to each other, and if anyone might have complained about the traditional chastity of knights they did it privately and quietly, for their love had saved all the kingdoms and for that no one would openly begrudge them their own unique vows.

In the summers Ser Brienne and Ser Jaime would vanish, and we believe they lived peacefully together in those months, though we knew not where. But when the days grew short and the shadows lengthened they would return to protect the Five Realms from the darkness, riding the King’s Road side by side. She bore the blade Oathkeeper which was called Lightbringer by those who knew her tale, and he bore his own sword which was called Dawn. They traveled the land together for many winters afterwards to face any dark magics that remained after the Long Night and to protect the smallfolk from brigands and monsters alike, and they were beloved everywhere they went.

You know them now only by the songs; it has been some seasons since they last were seen on the King's Road, and the memories of the Long Night have faded to a distant nightmare. Perhaps now they are living quietly and contentedly in some secret place, with children just like you at their feet. Those of us who saw them in those dark days hope for that, for assuredly they have earned their peace.

But we know that if ever the great Winter returns and the Night’s King rides again beyond the new Wall the Knights of the Morning will come back to protect us, with their Valyrian swords burning like suns in their hands, and the darkness will flee before them.


End file.
